Friday, March 13, 2015

...If I were a state administrator responsible for state testing, a superintendent, a schoolboard member, a teacher, a parent, or even a student old enough to make my owndecisions about my education, I would seriously consider not participating in the cominground of high-stakes national testing—the tests will do too much damage on too manylevels to students, teachers, and champions of education. I salute those who have takencourageous stands to opt-out of the new rounds of testing. The tests cannot be fixed in thetime before they’ll be administered. And in the current political climate, there will not befunding available for those who could fix them to actually fix them.I recognize that a stand to resist the tests has many consequences, some severe in theshort run. But anyone who takes this stand now will be exonerated in the long run. It isthe moral and practical thing to do. Next year a stand taken against the tests today willlook prescient.I recognize that most people with a stake in education aren’t inclined or aren’t in aposition to become “conscientious objectors” and opt-out of participating in the comingtests. What can we do?We can mitigate the damage by protecting students from days, weeks, even months oftest prep for these tests. Based on the evidence Smarter Balance has given us, practice ontheir tools will not lead to better teaching or learning. In fact it will “dumb down”instruction.We can make sure the right people are held responsible for what’s to come—among themthe players who took our precious national and state funds for education and deliveredthis assessment junk. We can support and defend the teachers and educationalprofessionals who have done all they can to improve mathematics education in countlessways, but who will take the fall for poor test results.CritiqueofSmarterBalancedCommonCoreTestsforMathematics,SREducationAssociates 31We can urge schools and school boards to ignore the results of these contrived and fatallyflawed high-stakes tests—they do not measure mathematical understanding.We can work to uncouple Common Core from the testing consortia and try to save thepotential of CCSSM, even while we let the tests, testing consortia, and their corporatepartners crash and burn.We can continue to research and develop well-crafted digital tools for mathematicseducation and work to deploy them in realistic time frames and in appropriate contexts.We can demand the education funding necessary for teaching and assessing in thiscountry in ways worthy of our students. The promise of cheaper but deeper assessments36was a false promise from the start.Maybe we can even make great assessments some day

Ofsted, the schools watchdog, has previously highlighted the problem of underachievement of white working class children, which has also been the subject of an inquiry by the cross-party education committee.

Girls lead boys in academic achievement globally

Geary determined that girls outperform boys in educational achievement in 70 percent of the countries they studied, regardless of the level of gender, political, economic or social equality.

Considerable attention has been paid to how boys' educational achievements in science and math compare to girls' accomplishments in those areas, often leading to the assumption that boys outperform girls in these areas. Now, using international data, researchers at the University of Missouri and the University of Glasgow in Glasgow, Scotland, have determined that girls outperform boys in educational achievement in 70 percent of the countries they studied—regardless of the level of gender, political, economic or social equality."We studied the educational achievement levels of 1.5 million 15-year-olds from around the world using data collected between 2000 and 2010," said David Geary, Curators Professor of Psychological Sciences in the College of Arts and Science at MU. "Even in countries where women's liberties are severely restricted, we found that girls are outperforming boys in reading, mathematics, and science literacy by age 15, regardless of political, economic, social or gender equality issues and policies found in those countries."According to the data, boys fall behind girls in overall achievement across reading, mathematics, and science in 70 percent of the countries studied. Boys outperform girls in only three countries or regions: Colombia, Costa Rica and the Indian state, Himachal Pradesh. Boys and girls had similar educational achievements in the United States and United Kingdom.In countries known for relatively low gender equality ratings, such as Qatar, Jordan and the United Arab Emirates, the educational achievement gap is relatively large and favors girls.

Thursday, January 22, 2015

A paper led by authors Sarah-Jane Leslie of Princeton Leslie and Cimpian found that only the field-specific ability beliefs hypothesis, unlike the three competitors, is able to predict gender differences across all of academia, as well as differences for other similarly underrepresented groups, such as African Americans. "We found academic fields that emphasized the need for raw brilliance were more likely to endorse the claim that women are less well suited than men to be top scholars in the field, "says Cimpian," and further that such fields are less welcoming to women.", but this pattern did not appear among Asian Americans

Jan 15, 2015 - To examine gender gaps in academia, researchers at Princeton University ... Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and Sarah-Jane Leslie, PrincetonUniversity) ... "We were talking about these different ways of thinking about what's ...

Jan 15, 2015 - A new study finds that the academic disciplines most associated with ...Now one researcher says that gender stereotype in art may have a real impact on women in academia. Sarah-Jane Leslie is a philosopher at Princeton University. ...says the problems women face in her discipline are no different than ...

Jan 15, 2015 - It appears instead that women are underrepresented in academic fields whose ... and Princeton University philosophy professor Sarah-Jane Leslie ... The researchers focused on the culture of different fields, reasoning that ...

Jan 15, 2015 - It appears instead that women are underrepresented in academic fields whose ... and Princeton University philosophy professor Sarah-Jane Leslie, ... that female underrepresentation is not the result of actual differences in ...

IN 1978 the Supreme Court, in the Bakke case, struck down racial quotas in higher education. Summing up, Justice Lewis Powell called the undergraduate admissions policy at Harvard an “illuminating example” of a better approach. The elite Ivy League institution did not reserve a specific number of places for poor minority candidates. Instead, it considered race as one of several “plus” factors in a student’s file. Thirty-six years later, Harvard’s method of reviewing candidates is being challenged in a federal district court in Boston. The plaintiffs claim its admissions policy is a quota system in disguise that discriminates against Asian-Americans.This is the latest legal challenge to affirmative action—and the first to target a private university—hatched by Edward Blum, an activist bent on dismantling Bakke. Among other campaigns, Mr Blum’s organisation, the Project on Fair Representation, recruits students who believe they have been unfairly rejected from universities that use racial preferences.

Edward Blum 2008 he helped launch the case of Abigail Fisher, a white woman with a high B+ average who was rejected by the University of Texas at Austin. Ms Fisher lost, and lost again last summer and is petitioning the justices for yet another hearing.

Students for Fair Admissions (SFFA), a new vehicle for Mr Blum’s campaign. The SFFA has an impressive poster-child: an unnamed offspring of Chinese immigrants with perfect scores on three college admissions tests who graduated first in his (or her) class at a competitive high school, captained the tennis team and volunteered as a “fundraiser for National Public Radio”.

This may be hard to prove. Harvard rejects thousands of students with perfect SAT scores every year.

Jewish quotas: at Harvard from the 1920s to the 1950s, but draws no direct link to discrimination against Asian-Americans now.

Increase in Asians And a table in the SFFA’s own brief shows that between 2007 and 2013 Asian-American enrolment at Harvard went from 15% to 18%, an increase of a fifth that may be hard to reconcile with charges of a silent quota. [But Hu studies in mid 1980s show they were at 15%, and trends showed a sudden cap in both Asian and Hispanic admissions, the two fastest growing up, and almost no growth between 1985 and 2005]

Asians have lower admission share than applicants: Asian-Americans made up over 27% of the applicant pool at the three most selective Ivy League colleges from 2008 to 2012, they comprised only 17-20% of the students admitted. This, the SFFA contends, constitutes [well, it could be a sign, but does not prove] “intentional discrimination” in violation of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

if the plaintiffs manage to prove that Harvard sets “a cap on the number of Asians who get in”, Mr Primus says, the university will lose and “admissions at elite colleges will probably change in substantial ways.”

Tuesday, September 16, 2014

Though the developers and supporters of the Common Core standards have repeatedly said the purpose of the controversial education initiative is to close the achievement gap between low-income black and Hispanic and white middle-class students, an online Hispanic publication doubts that may happen.John Benson of Hispanic media site Voxxi, writes, "If some early reports on the controversial Common Core Standards are an indication, Hispanic students in the U.S. are falling behind on the very curriculum that was intended to help them achieve higher proficiency in school."
Voxxi cites the New York State report of its recent Common Core-aligned test scores that show only 23 percent of Latinos are proficient in math, while 19 percent are proficient in English.
“Kentucky is the other state that is utilizing the Common Core Standards, but results from last year’s school year aren’t yet available,” states Voxxi. “Expectations are the achievement gap between Latinos and whites will remain high.”
However, according to Peggy McLeod, National Council of La Raza deputy vice president of Education and Workforce Development, the anticipated effects of the Common Core on closing the achievement gap are long-term and cannot be judged by current scores on Common Core-aligned tests.
“It’s not the Common Core they’re having issues with, it’s the implementation of the Common Core,” McLeod told Voxxi. “The standards are good, they’re high standards. If implemented correctly, kids will be college and career ready. It’s just a matter of providing a robust implementation and strategies specific to Latino kids who might need additional language support.”
“When you look at performance, it will all even out if districts and schools provide appropriate services and provide good high-quality instruction,” McLeod continued. “You can’t put responsibility on Latino kids or their parents.”
According to Common Core patron Bill Gates and the so-called “architect” of Common Core David Coleman, the true purpose of the nationalized standards is to correct what is viewed by liberal political, education, and corporate elitists as societal injustices largely toward Hispanic and black students.
As Breitbart News reported in June, an interview with the Washington Post summarized how Bill Gates pulled off the very “swift Common Core revolution.” The Microsoft founder stated, “The country as a whole has a huge problem that low-income kids get less good education than suburban kids get… and that is a huge challenge.”
Gates’ statement underscored the notion that the Common Core standards initiative is a social engineering project that places education standards and testing ahead of parental and family influences as the major cause of poor student performance in low-income and minority communities.
LaRaza’s McLeod’s statement, “You can’t put responsibility on Latino kids or their parents,” counters the notion of self-responsibility.
Similarly Coleman, now the College Board president, praised the collection of student data via the Common Core standards initiative at a conference in 2013, as a vehicle to reach the “low-hanging fruit,” or low-income and Latino students.